News, articles and information about Jewish art, architecture, and historic sites. This blog includes material to be posted on the website of the International Survey of Jewish Monuments (www.isjm.org).

Next door to the Old Synagogue of
Plzen (about which I wrote the other day), on the ruins of another synagogue building, is a modest Holocaust
memorial; the collaborative work of a local teacher,
students, Jewish community members and Holocaust survivors. The monument was inaugurated in 2002 on the 60th anniversary of the deportation of Plzen's (Pilsen) Jewish community to Terezin. The memorial and is materially
simple but conceptually rich. It draws on some of the oldest and best
traditions of Jewish commemorative practice including the piling of
stones, the naming of names, and the respectful treatment of the ruins of holy
sites, including synagogues. Perhaps equally important is that this was a collaborative
effort, locally conceived, that grew from a teacher’s vision and student
engagement.

While publicly inaugurated and created with modest but essential city support, the memorial is a very private place. One needs to find it. The progression leads from Stephen’s Square (today’s Smetana Park), from the portal of the Jewish Community building, through the vaulted passageway into the courtyard, and then around the substantial Old Synagogue. The monument's solitude is a virtue for contemplation, but removes it from the broader public view afforded the traditional "monuments to great men" adorning Smetana Park, such as that to Josef Frantisek Smetana (Tomáš Seidan, sculptor, 1874), the Czech poet, philosopher, physicist, and Roman Catholic priest after whom this section of the park is named.

Plzen, Czech Republic. Entryway to courtyard of Jewish Community complex at 80/5 Stephen’s Square (today’s Smetana Park). One can just see the flank of the Old Synagogue through the door. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.

The memorial exists within the
ruined walls of the so-called Auxiliary Synagogue, also known as the Old Jewish
School that was built in 1875 next to the Old Synagogue. The two structures
were joined by a stone staircase to the galleries. After the opening of the
New (or Great) Synagogue in 1893, the
Auxiliary Synagogue was used for storage and today only the outer walls survive
to enclose the Holocaust Memorial. This was built as part of the project “Year 2002 — Year of Memories,” in which
Plzen hosted various events to commemorate the Holocaust, and in particular the
60th anniversary of the deportation of the local Jewish community in January
1942 when Plzen’s 2,604 Jews were sent to Terezin, and then to concentration and
death camps, including Auschwitz. Only 204 survived.

The idea for the memorial came from
Radovan Kodera, a local conservationist and photographer who got the idea when photographing
the massive New Synagogue which once seated up to 3,000 people.

At the memorial, each stone was inscribed with the name of a victim, and the stones are arranged alphabetically
in a pattern designed by Petr Novak, a local art school professor. 2,600 stones are laid out on gravel between wooden beams. Radovan described his idea in a 2002
JTA news story about the project:

“I was walking through the empty,
decaying building and thought it would be interesting to place stones on the
places where the people used to sit,” Kodera said. About two years ago [ca. 2000], he
revived his idea and decided to use the ruins of the old Jewish school. Around the same time, Kodera came
across a series of photographs of the Jewish transport. One of them showed a
family with children, each with a number hanging from their necks.

“Suddenly I wanted to know what happened
to those people,” Kodera said. “I went to search the archives in Prague and
found them by the numbers” around their necks. The Rosenbaum family, for example,
was transported from Terezin to Sobibor in eastern Poland, where the entire
family died.

“It had a very strong impact on me
and I thought that it could have the same effect even on other people,”
explained Kodera, who is not Jewish. “For most people it is just about
statistics, but if they know a name and write it down themselves, they might
develop a personal relationship with the victim.

Even relatives of victims who were
not from Pilsen asked if they could inscribe their family members’ names on the
stones. That explains why there are 200 more stones in the Old Jewish School
than the number of Jews who died in the Pilsen transport.

Local grammar school students [who are now adults], who
participated in Kodera’s project from the very beginning, now know detailed
information about the fates of the Jewish victims. “I wanted students to take part in
it, to be involved,” Kodera said, stressing how important it is for young
people to be interested in history.

The students picked up and washed
the pebbles and experimented with different types of paint that would be
weather resistant. They also gave special Japanese-made marker pens to visitors
who chose a stone and inscribed a name on it.

“Sometimes it is really touching,”
Kodera said, noting that some of the visitors are Holocaust survivors
themselves. “There have been quite a lot of people who have never been here before
and did not even know that the synagogue exists.”

Now, since the Old Synagogue has been restored and fitted with a permanent exhibit on Jewish Traditions and Customs as part of the EU-fund and Jewish community sponsored 10 Stars Revitalization of Jewish Monuments in the Czech Republic project, it is hoped and expected that more visitors will come to the memorial. I certainly hope so. Plzen is a beautiful town, mostly by-passed by foreign tourists to the Czech Republic who flood Prague every year.

Remembering names - writing them and reciting them - is among the
oldest form of perpetuating Jewish memory. We have genealogies in the
Book of Genesis, martyrologies after medieval massacres in Worms and
elsewhere, and Yahrzeit plaques in synagogues naming the dead and the dates on which they must be remembered. The earliest Holocaust
memorials ranging from landsmanschaft plats in American Jewish
cemeteries to the memorable and influential walls of names in the Pinkus
Synagogue in Prague attempted to identify the victims and list their name
so they would not be forgotten. The culmination of this process - still
ongoing - is the collection of all the names of the approximately 6
million victims of the Shoah by Yad Vashem into a single work - the
multi-volume Book of Names, which now lists the names of over 4 million Jewish victims, where I recently found the list of all the Samuel (Shmuel) Grubers known to have perished in the Shoah.

So too, piling stones is
an ancient Jewish custom of memory. Jacob said "Collect some stones" (Genesis 31:46) and Laban said to seal a contract with Jacob, "Let this cairn be a witness" (Genesis 31:48. Today we brings stones to a grave as a mark of love,
respect and veneration. We don't know the origin of this custom, and in
the ancient past there was perhaps a more practical purpose, to better
mark a place to warn of ritual impurity and/or to better to mark and
protect the grave.As memorials to people, stones are seen to be strong and enduring. Some scholars have suggested that the process of putting stones on graves, however, is more a reaction to the Christian custom of placing flowers, and it is true that many European Jewish "traditions" are actually reactions to - often in a contrarian way - popular Christian practice. Whatever the source, creating memorials with the gathering of stones of different shapes and sizes has become a way to literally build Holocaust memorials. In a general way, this creates, or re-creates the community of memorial stones of a Jewish cemetery. Some memorials, such as at the killing site of Treblinka, recall cemeteries. Other memorials with stones, often far from the places of horror, respond more to the tradition of cemeteries as gardens, such as the memorial garden designed by Andy Goldsworthy at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. But in New York, the narrative is about commemoration but also renewal. In the stones are drilled holes, from which trees take life and grow. The variations of the "stone garden" are many, and I will discuss other versions in future posts.

The Plzen Memorial is a modest but very effective Holocaust Memorial. It was made with wide and sincere community input. Significantly it cost very little. Apparently the City of Plzen contributed $2,000 and this was enough. Even if more funds were used, the amount is tiny compared to the millions spent on so many less effective monuments!Go visit Plzen! Visit the Jewish sites. Of course the food and beer are good, too.

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This blog provides news and opinion articles about Jewish art, architecture and historic sites - especially those where something new is happening. Developed in connection with news gathering for the International Survey of Jewish Monuments website (www.isjm.org), this blog highlights some of the most interesting Jewish sites around the world, and the most pressing issues affecting them.